Leviathan or The Whale

by Philip Hoare

  This eerie creature was claimed to be one hundred feet long, rugged with barnacles and able to shatter boats with his twenty-eight-foot-wide flukes, or grind them to pieces with his massive jaws. He was said to have killed thirty men, stoven fourteen boats, and had nineteen harpoons planted in him. Reynolds’s story ends with the whalers triumphant: ‘a stream of black, clotted gore rose in a thick spout above the expiring brute, and fell in a shower around, bedewing, or rather drenching us, with a spray of blood…And the monster, under the convulsive influence of his final paroxysm, flung his huge tail into the air…then turned slowly and heavily on his side and lay a dead mass upon the sea.’ In reality, Mocha Dick–or at least a whale like him–continued to roam the oceans from the Falkland Islands to the Sea of Japan, attacking English, American and Russian ships without discrimination before being taken by a Swedish whaler in August 1859.

  It was as if the hunted whale had become aware of its persecution, and was fighting a rearguard action. ‘From the accounts of those who were in the early stages of the fishery,’ wrote Owen Chase, ‘it would appear that the whales have been driven, like the beasts of the forest, before the march of civilisation into remote and more unfrequented seas.’ ‘Sperm whales are now much scarcer than in years past,’ noted Charles Nordhoff in the 1850s, ‘owing to the number of vessels which annually fit out from American and various parts of Europe, partly or entirely in pursuit of them.’

  They may also have been more formidable opponents. Chase claimed that the animal that sank the Essex in its ‘mysterious and mortal attack’ was eighty-five feet long; Thomas Beale recorded sperm whales of eighty feet; while a lower jaw preserved in Oxford’s University Museum confidently announces an owner of eighty-eight feet. In Nimrod of the Sea; or, The American Whaleman, published in 1879, W.M. Davis registered sperm whales reliably measured at ninety feet; Ishmael heard of others one hundred feet long. Yet no modern sperm whale grows to more than sixty-five feet.

  Some speculate that the hunting of large whales has gradually reduced their genetic likelihood; perhaps the Essex’s assailant was the last of a gigantic breed. The larger lone bulls were inevitably the first to be taken, and twentieth-century hunting accelerated this cull, while skewing our knowledge of the whale’s longevity. Assessments of their life spans rely on whaling statistics from the second half of the last century, by which time most of the older animals–being larger and more profitable–were dead.

  By the end of worldwide whaling, nearly three-quarters of all sperm whales had been killed, reducing a population of more than a million in 1712 to 360,000 by the end of the twentieth century. Even in the 1840s the whalers saw a definite decline, and wondered if their efforts would lead to the animal’s demise. In the chapter entitled, ‘Does The Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?–Will He Perish?’, the impeccably informed Ishmael cites the buffalo as ‘an irresistible argument…to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction’, although he also declares that sperm whales that once swam as ‘scattered solitaries…are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies’.

  Were these animals collectively enraged by their attackers and determined to fight back, just as modern rogue elephants, their habitat destroyed by man, are now thought to turn on humans? If the scars on bull male sperm whales are any indication, they are ferocious fighters among themselves. Certainly, the Yankee captains thought that the whales had become more wilful. Docile beasts turned on their assailants, using their own weapons–jaws, heads, flukes. Captain Edward Gardner of the Winslow, out of New Bedford, was another victim, nearly killed by a sperm whale off Peru in 1816, ‘wounding me on my head’ and ‘breaking my right arm, and left hand badly lacerated, my jaw and five teeth were broken, my wounds bled copiously’.

  It was as if the whales were complicit in the role allotted to them. ‘In times past, when they were not so continually worried and followed, they were much easier to approach, although often giving battle when attacked,’ Charles Nordhoff observed. ‘Now, however, the utmost care is required to “get on”.’ As Ishmael confides, ‘I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.’

  And yet, conversely, the whales’ reactions could be entirely and almost pathetically inactive. Although a sperm whale could easily outdistance its persecutors, diving far and fast out of range, it often did not do so. Sometimes when their enemies approached, or when one of their number was injured–as Frederick Bennett wrote in another of the books that Melville consulted during his researches–the whales would ‘crowd together, stationary and trembling, or make but confused and irresolute attempts to escape’.

  Paradoxically, such suicidal behaviour was in part due to the animal’s ability to live in the depths. At the surface, the sperm whale is slower, less agile and has less time and energy than other whales–and is therefore less able to flee such an unnatural predator as man. It is an inexplicable and potentially fatal evolutionary flaw, and it led the writer John Fowles to wonder why the sperm whale ‘has never acquired–as it easily could in physical terms–an efficient flight behaviour when faced with man. At times, it will almost queue up to be gunned…The poor brutes just never learnt’

  Man, whale, life, death: this was the story Melville had to tell. No writer, before or since, could have had such an epic gift. On one side, the world’s greatest predator, more legendary than real; on the other, young American heroes, men who risked everything in the pursuit of oil. Theirs was a quest that asserted the myth of America, the great new democracy in which anyone might find their fortune; but it also brought them into contact with something more mysterious. Moby Dick was a spectral creature believed to be omnipresent–‘actually…encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time’–and able to escape repeated and bloody attacks, reappearing ‘in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away’. In this incarnation, the whale became ubiquitous, its hugeness as numinous as dark matter; an animal more mystical than muscular; as if the spermatozoid were a universe at the same time.

  At first Melville dismissed such metaphysics. His book was to be as much a commercial venture as any whale-ship setting sail from New Bedford, his lay to be shared with his publishers. ‘Blubber is blubber,’ he told a friend, treating his new work as another Redburn, which he knew ‘to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with’. But all that would change. In his magpie imagination, named and nameless terrors gathered strength and power like the ominous white whale seen below the surface, ‘with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose…his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea’. In the process Moby-Dick became a legend itself; a story encoded with its own terrible beauty, one that saw into the future even as it looked into the past.

  Monument Mountain stands off Route 7, its lower reaches surrounded by dense woods. A century and a half ago, the trees were not so close-grown. On a summer morning, the aftermath of two days’ rain is still percolating through the pines, drip-drip-dripping as I clamber my way up the slippery path. The hillside is strewn with huge boulders; a deep valley opens to the other side, coursed by a stream overhung by ferns. As I make my final ascent, a rain cloud bursts overhead, sweeping over the rocks on which garter snakes bask; bright orange lizards dart into crevices. At the summit, quartzite crags topped with stunted pines hang precipitously over themselves. Far below is the green-carpeted valley of the Housatonic River. Hawks hover on the updraught. All the world seems caught in the stillness.

  It was here in Western Massachusetts, in the summer of 1850, away from ‘the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York’, that Melville met a man who would change the course of his life. While staying with his aunt in nearby Pittsfield, he read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, and was besotted with its wistful evocation of old New England. By coincidence Hawthorne himself was living nearby, drawn to the sublime beauty of the Berkshires–countryside not unlike England’s Lake District. It was a romantic setting in the purest sense
of the word; and what happened next was a kind of epiphany.

  At forty-six years old, Nathaniel Hawthorne was America’s most famous writer. He too came from a sea-going family–he was only four when his father, a sea captain, had died of fever in Surinam–and he had grown up with his mother and two sisters. That much he and Melville had in common. But where the sea was Herman’s Harvard and Yale, Nathaniel had attended the grassy campus of Bowdoin College, Maine, before exchanging it for a gloomy house in Salem, where he spent twelve years sequestered in his attic, emerging only at night to walk the streets. ‘I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon,’ he confessed; ‘and now, I cannot find the key to let myself out.’

  ‘Handsomer than Lord Byron’, with dark eyes ‘like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens’, Hawthorne dwelt on morbid things, although the monsters he summoned were decidedly human. His Puritan ancestors–with ‘all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil’–had persecuted Quakers, and had taken part in the Salem witch trials. This legacy infused the fictional world Hawthorne inhabited, and the real world he invented. He was, as the poet Mary Oliver would write, ‘one of the great imaginers of evil’.

  Hawthorne was filled with regret at the way the world had been, and the way it was becoming. ‘Here and there and all around us,’ he wrote in his story, ‘Fire Worship’, ‘…the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.’ He once told his wife Sophia that he felt as if he were ‘already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed’. And although he loved to swim in the river at the bottom of his garden in Concord at night, seeing the moon dance on the surface–where I swam too, pushing my way through the clear water and bright green weeds, imagining Billy Budd caught in their oozy fronds–he was haunted by the memory of a drowned young woman who was once pulled from the same river, her limbs white and swaying in the water.

  Hawthorne was, in his own words, ‘a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped in the midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness’. He wrote artful allegories burdened with the weight of history, guilt and revenge; especially the stories that Melville saw as Hawthorne’s masterpieces, and which would influence his own work. In ‘Young Goodman Brown’, set in seventeenth-century Salem, a young man is summoned to the forest at night to find the entire town enslaved to the devil, even his young wife. In the futuristic ‘Earth’s Holocaust’, a bonfire on the prairie incinerates every example of human excess, from tobacco to works of literature. Yet one thing will not burn in this reforming pyre: the latent evil in every human heart. Sin, too, was the subject of his novel, The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850; and in the wake of its success, Hawthorne had escaped the clamour of fame by moving to Lenox in the Berkshires, close by a calm freshwater lake, where he hoped to work on his next book, The House of the Seven Gables.

  Hawthorne could not avoid society even in the country, and on 5 August he was persuaded to attend a picnic organized by David Dudley Field, a well-connected New York lawyer. The guests included distinguished literary figures: Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes–coiner of the term, Boston Brahmin–‘several ladies’ and Melville. The party set off for Monument Mountain, but before they could reach the summit a sudden shower sent them running for shelter under a rocky ledge, where they drank champagne from a silver mug.

  As the sun reappeared, the picnickers struck out for the mountain top. Melville was in high spirits; perhaps the alcohol and the rarefied air had gone to his head. He clambered over a long rock which jutted out like a bowsprit, pretending to haul in imaginary rigging, and made as if to harpoon a whale-shaped pond in the valley below. The young man’s play-acting was a burst of energy in the dog-days of summer–an echo of the scenes in Typee in which the narrator and his fellow deserter Toby climb a tropical peak to escape the tyranny of their ship, and feel the intensity of their new-found freedom.

  The headiness of the day, the sublimity of the landscape, and, perhaps, Melville’s company, were infectious, and they roused Hawthorne to similar antics. That afternoon, as they wandered through the ‘Gothic shades’ of a gloomy spot known as the Icy Glen–it was said ice was found in its mossy recesses all year round–it was his turn to perform, shouting out, in his rich voice, ‘warnings of inevitable destruction to the whole party’. Then they all repaired to the Fields’ house for dinner, at which they discussed the sea serpent that had made an appearance off the coast of Massachusetts.

  It was clear that Hawthorne–already an admirer of Typee–found Melville a magnetic figure. ‘I do not know a more independent personage,’ he would write. ‘He learned his travelling-habits by drifting about, all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers.’ Perhaps he even listened with envy to the sailor’s adventures, a sense of outlandish experience to contrast with his own haunted introspection. That day on the mountain marked an almost alchemical mix: of fire–Hawthorne’s prairie holocaust–and water–Melville’s whalish romance. Both were men of a brave new republic; both might have looked optimistically towards the future. But in time, the lively and mercurial Melville would descend into the gloom that Hawthorne inhabited, swapping the sun-baked summit for the dank dripping glen.

  A month after meeting Hawthorne, Melville moved to a farm two miles south of Pittsfield, bought with the help of his wealthy father-in-law and named Arrowhead after the Indian artefacts he found in its fields; in the distance stood Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. For two hours a day Melville would work the fields as a farmer; he even sold cider from the roadside, a memory of the house’s former guise as a tavern. But he was also less than an hour’s ride from Hawthorne’s house at Lenox. ‘I met Melville, the other day,’ Hawthorne told a friend, ‘and I like him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me.’

  Melville expressed himself in rather stronger terms. In a gesture that was both revealing and concealing at the same time, he wrote a review of Mosses from an Old Manse in the guise of ‘a Virginian spending July in Vermont’, and in language that seems astonishingly suggestive to modern ears: ‘I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots in the hot soil of my Southern soul.’

  Tethered by meetings and ever longer letters, the friend–ship between the two men grew. Later, when Sophia Hawthorne and their daughters, Una and Rose, went to visit relatives, leaving Nathaniel in charge of five-year-old Julian and his pet rabbit, Melville took the opportunity to call. He arrived, glamorously, driving a barouche and pair, with Evert and George Duyckinck, his dog and a picnic in the back. Hawthorne supplied the champagne, and they set off to visit the Shaker village at Hancock. Hawthorne, who had sampled Utopia during his brief stay at the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, found the celibate Shakers a sad blasphemy, with their ‘particularly narrow beds, hardly wide enough for one sleeper, but in each of which, the old elder told us, two people slept’. It was a ‘close junction of man with man’ which Hawthorne professed to find ‘hateful and disgusting’. Ishmael and Queequeg may have seen it differently.

  At Lenox, the two men would sit in the Hawthornes’ parlour smoking cigars normally forbidden in the house, talking ‘about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next…and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night’ (a phrase that Sophia inked out when editing her husband’s journal for publication). They did not agree on all subjects: on slavery, for instance, for whose victims Hawthorne had not ‘the slightest sympathy…or, at least, not half as much for the labouring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off. For all Melville felt for Hawthorne, it seemed he wanted more than his friend could give.

  Melville’s book–which he described to Evert Duyckinck as ‘a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable pres
entment of the Whale Fishery’–was almost finished when he came to the Berkshires. Meeting Hawthorne changed all that. The younger man had complained of being restrained from writing ‘the kind of book I would wish to’. Now he was compelled to see the significance of his experiences, and as if to set them in context, he began to read rapaciously, as though he had never read before: books brought back from London, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or ones borrowed from the New York library, such as William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions; Robert Burton’s eccentric and digressive Anatomy of Melancholy; essays by Emerson in which God was revealed in nature; and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, imbued with dreams, dæmonic possession and self-sacrificing love.

  Then he found a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays in print large enough to overcome his weak eyes. ‘I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, & promenaded in Broadway,’ he fantasized. But he would also fill his own book with earthy asides and euphemisms; jokes about chowder and bar-room quips with which Ishmael wryly undermines his creator’s high-flown words, declaring at one point that he regards the whole dangerous voyage of the Pequod- and life itself–as a ‘vast practical joke’, and informs Queequeg that he ‘might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will’, with his friend as his lawyer, executor, and legatee.

  Melville was liberated by America, a place where he could write about anything and everything, and where he was perfectly aware of the double meaning of his words, even as Starbuck exhorted his crew: ‘Pull my boys! Sperm, sperm’s the play!’ There was a new urgency to his work which almost seemed to set him apart from what he was doing, time-coding his words–